Media outlets are billing the upcoming London Summer Olympic Games as “the first social media Olympics.” That means athletes and coaches will be posting, tweeting, Facebooking and generally bringing fans closer to the action more than ever before. So why is the International Olympic Committee trying to censor participants?

During the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, Facebook had 100 million users and Twitter six million. This time around, athletes, coaches and other participants will address 900 million Facebook members and 140 million Twitter members. The Internet Olympic Committee is aware of both the benefits and pitfalls of participants communicating directly with fans. It also recognizes that social media will be a huge part of the Olympic experience. So, while the organization is encouraging athletes to blog, tweet and use Facebook during the games, it has also issued guidelines that must be followed by participants.

Some of the guidelines are clearly motivated by the IOC’s need to protect the investment of broadcasters and advertisers who have paid to be officially linked to the Olympics. For example, one rule states that “participants and other accredited persons are not permitted to promote any brand, product or service within a posting, blog or tweet.” That is, if Nike sponsors an event, participants had better not tweet on behalf of Reebok.

Others are more ambiguous. For example, “Postings, blogs and tweets should at all times conform to the Olympic spirit and fundamental principles of Olympism as contained in the Olympic Charter, be dignified and in good taste, and not contain vulgar or obscene words or images.” This directive leaves a gaping gray area in which athletes can’t possibly know what might offend the committee.

Brad Shear is an attorney and author of the Shear on Social Media Law blog. In a recent interview with ReadWriteWeb, he said that the IOC is well within its rights to have a social media policy that includes potential sanctions. Olympians have a variety of contractual obligations and agree to rules and regulations that apply when they reside in the Olympic Village. “When you have a contractual relationship, you can be punished,” he said, “and if you don’t abide by the regulations, you can be punished. Being an Olympian is a privilege, not a right.”

Alex Huot, IOC Head of Social Media, emphasized in a keynote speech at April’s TheNextWeb2012 conference that the Olympic governing body is focusing primarily on facilitating connections between fans and athletes, and paying close attention to what types of interactions the fans prefer.

If fans prefer interactions that the committee deems unseemly, though, they’ll be out of luck. What one person considers in good taste, another may not. In one culture, a word may be considered an obscenity, while in another, the same word may rarely raise an eyebrow. While many calls will simply rest on the committee’s judgment, in most cases the remedy will be simple: The IOC will issue a takedown notice to the participant, simply stating that the content must be removed from the athlete’s Facebook page, Twitter account or blog. The consequences of failure to comply are not clear. The committee threatens sanctions, but it hasn’t yet specified specific penalties.

Shear said he believes that the IOC’s social media policy is, at best, a work in progress, and that both official Olympic sponsors and the IOC will likely learn some hard lessons as the 2012 games progress. ”It’s a great idea to protect advertisers in digital space,” he said. “But if Olympian A tweets, factually, that he had a Hershey’s bar, another company that has paid to be the official Olympic candy bar can complain that the tweet is harming their brand. What is the IOC going to do about it? They will ask the athlete to remove the tweet, but once it’s been retweeted, once it’s out there online, it’s hard to remove.”

The 2012 Olympics in London are being touted by some as the world’s “first social Games.” While some question just how social they’ll actually be, there’s no doubt that networks such as Facebook, Twitter andYouTube will play an unprecedented role in how information is disseminated from London, and how the global sports conversation is driven during July and August.

Why the big shift? It’s simple: Four years is an eternity in Internet time and since the last Summer Olympics in 2008, social media has exploded.

Web use in general has grown rapidly, too. In 2008, there were about 1.5 billion Internet users globally, according to the International Telecommunications Union, making up about 23% of the world’s total population. By this summer’s games, that number will have swelled to about 2.3 billion users making up about a third of the world’s total population.

Summer Olympics feature some of the most popular international sports — including soccer, basketball, swimming, and track and field — so that’s sure to fuel the global buzz as well. For more context on just how and why social media will reshape this year’s Olympics in relation to 2008, we thought it’d be interesting to take a quick look at a few of the world’s most popular networks and how they compare then and now.

Facebook

2008: A tweet in August of 2008 from then-Facebook executive and eventual Path co-founder Dave Moringleefully celebrated Facebook breaking the 100 million-user threshold. 2008 was also marked by reports around the web of Facebook — gasp! — passing MySpace in popularity. The social network debuted its now omnipresent chat feature that year as well.

Today: Facebook claims more than 900 million users, is fast becoming a portal to the web at large for many and is a publicly traded company. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg is a global celebrity.

Twitter

2008: 2008 saw explosive growth for Twitter, and it still finished the year with about 6 million registered users who sent about 300,000 tweets per day. The social network and its users were still very much finding their way, as evidenced by this official blog post explaining @replies. In 2009, Minnesota Timberwolves forwardKevin Love would tweet that the team’s coach had been let go, breaking the story and causing some in the sports world to speculate that maybe, just maybe, the service could change how news was delivered and consumed.

Today: Twitter currently claims more than 500 million users who collectively send some 400 million tweetseach and every day. Sports news regularly breaks on the network, it’s become a prime marketing channel for athletes and much of the London 2012 conversation among media and fans is sure to take place there.

YouTube

2008: By fall of 2008, YouTube users were uploading 10 hours of video to the site per minute. The site had emerged as the go-to destination for web video and had been acquired by Google two years prior. It also launched its mobile site, pre-roll ads and 720p HD option in 2008. But that success was nothing compared to what the site would look like four years later.

Today: Iconic Olympic moments are sure to go viral and become immortalized on YouTube seemingly as they happen this summer, and it’s easy to see why. The company says it receives over 800 million unique visits per month. Those visitors watch more than 3 billion hours of video per month and upload 72 hours of new video content per minute. Five hundred years’ worth of YouTube video are watched on Facebook every day and more than 700 YouTube videos get shared on Twitter each minute.

What It All Means

Just looking at the the three most ubiquitous social networks reveals a sporting scene and world at large that have been transformed by social media since the last Summer Olympics. And that doesn’t take into account services like Pinterest, Foursquare and Google+ — none of which even existed in 2008. This summer, expect news to break, social sharing records to fall and moments to live on as never possible before thanks to social media. And to think — this will all pale in comparison to what 2016 has in store.

Leading up to the 1 year anniversary of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, I appeared in a short segment on a Vancouver radio station News 1130 for an Olympic flashback series to examine the legacies + discussed social media as a whole and covering the Games.

Blurb: I discussed social media as a whole and covering the Games through the True North Media House project – plus the impending With Glowing Hearts movie premiere. In the short clip, I included brief anecdotes about reliving the fun, documenting and storytelling, and how social media can provide depth and breadth to provide more attention to more stories beyond the “official” IOC/VANOC story.

Aleks was armed with his digital camera, a flip video camera, and his TNMH self accreditation. His is aim was to visit everything and anything that was free.

In the end he built an online / offline pool of memories that will last him and his family a lifetime. Aleks’ understanding of technology and media is astounding and the experience made him an incredibly confident young guy.

The experience has left a lasting impression on him and he is planning his next online project.

On behalf of the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC), we regret to informyou that we are unable to fulfill your request for media accreditationfor the 2012 Olympic Games at this time, due to the high number ofrequests received and the limited number of accreditations available.

Should you have any questions regarding the press accreditationprocess for the 2012 Olympic Games please feel free to contact myselfor Caroline Sharp at (613) 244-2020, csharp@olympic.ca.

Thank you for your submission and for your interest in covering theCanadian Olympic Team at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Sincerely,

Riley Denver

Communications Coordinator │Coordinateur, Communications

Canadian Olympic Committee │Comité olympique canadien

21 St. Clair Ave. E., Suite 900, Toronto, ON, Canada M4T 1L9

Tel / Tél: (416) 324-4143 │ Fax / Télé: (416) 967-4902

You can find the Canadian Olympic Team on both Facebook (CanadianOlympic Team) and Twitter (CDNOlympicTeam)

Thanks to our thousands of users, we have what seems to be an infinite amount of data about how small businesses and using social media. We analyzed how small businesses differ from personal users, what networks they use the most, and where the most engagement can be found.

Here is a breakdown of some of the more interesting results that came out of our research:

Nearly ¼ of our small business users are on WordPress, while others are on Tumblr and Blogger in smaller numbers.

31% of our business users who have a profile on Facebook have more than one account on the network. Similarly, 10% of businesses on Twitter have more than one account on the micro-blogging network.

Twitter is a more engaged and responsive audience than any other social network, Facebook included

Small businesses are using social media management tools like Postling more and more every single day. The desire for a one-stop site that aggregates comments across all social networks is increasingly in demand, as well as general ways to save time while using social media

The Manuals run on for thousands of pages and I’m sure there are elements of the IOC’s plans that bear further investigation. For this reason I am placing them, along with that Host City Contract, online. Just click on the links below:

After covering SLC02 as a fan, I realized that what you see on the ground is very different from the TV coverage ~ from hospitality houses to international relationships to the athletes who finish towards the back – the rights-holding media miss a lot.

I connected with some pals (@kk @scales) with similar thoughts and we covered Torino06 and Beijing08 using new media tools to creating and tactics for distribution.

In prep for Vancouver2010, we reached out to VANOC to offer assistance in our hometown to generate social coverage. After no love coming back, we launched the True North Media House campaign to inspire, educate and amplify social coverage throughout the games – no matter whether social reporters wanted to celebrate, protest or observe.

With the hoopla done, we can step back and examine the massive body of work produced and the unique ways people grab ahold of the campaign and made it something organic, successful and loads of fun.

A few tactics:

* Self accreditation badgers – sign up, add feed and handles and print a (cool) badge to declare yourself a social reporter ready to create and share
* Aggregation – pulled feeds into Yahoo pipes, fed into HootSuite for firehose Twitter feed
* Outreached to PR agencies – once they realized our ability to amplify, we were invited to many media events
* Friendly to IOC – though initially they were incommunicado, by the end, they outreached and evolved policies for photos and fan coverage
* Ad hoc events – anyone could organize an events from dog sled demos to street hockey games to photo walks
* Educate and workshop – we spoke at universities, to community groups, conferences and workshops to explain the power of tagging, creative commons and sharing
* Reach out to academics – Groups of students (including PhD candidates) chronicled our community
* Media worthy – non rights-holding media picked up on what we were doing and provided coverage in PBS, CBC, Harvard Business, LA Times among others and many MSM joined up for fun and knowledge

To learn more follow the #tnmh tag on twitter or visit truenorthmediahouse.com or the TNMH photo group on Flickr or twitter.com/tnmh – happy to talk more about how and why we did this.